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The following short essay and poem were commissioned in 2002 for publication in Kader El-Janabi’s short-lived magazine,

Arapoetica de la Poésie Internationale, but with that magazine’s demise or suspension, was never actually published. The issue for which it was intended was to focus on the connection between American and French poetry over the preceding century. In its original English version the concluding poem (“Three Paris Elegies”) had appeared earlier in A Paradise of Poets (New Directions, 1999). Baghdad-born and long exiled in Paris, El-Janabi remains for me an exemplary fighter against all forms of political and religious despotism – concerns at the center of his poetry and art.

For myself, writing and living in late-twentieth-century America, there was a sense that all of us, as poets, shared a past and future with forerunners and contemporaries across a startling range of times and places. This came at a time when we were discovering ourselves also as American poets with a new language in which to write and a new perspective – a series of new perspectives – that we could write from. If the thrill of the moment led some into an easy jingoism or a more interesting localism, for others it opened the possibility of an experience of poetry and life that could truly push against the boundaries of languages and cultures.

For those of us who meant to proceed by new means, modern means – to be “absolutely modern” in Rimbaud’s phrase – the memory and presence of Paris and France loomed large. Never mind that at the same time we were discovering America or that we were determined dwellers in our own cities (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago). Paris as city and vortex (Pound’s word) was with us in our imagination as poets – even for those of us who had never set foot there. There were exceptions of course – poets who felt themselves to be more exclusively American or were themselves distanced from the great cities of America and Europe; Snyder and Olson, say, among the really good ones. But for myself again, Paris, once I had found it, was a place I could inhabit, not the physical city so much as the the world of experimental and radical modernism that the city had once come to represent. Post-modernism, for myself and my companions, was no more than the transfer – often contentious – of the older modernist impulse into a new terrain and time.

I have lived almost my whole life on the two coasts of North America – New York first and California later. From both of these Europe was less than a single day’s travel, and because that travel became increasingly possible (starting for me in the late 1960s), I came to think of myself as inhabiting two continents. In 1997 I spent four months in Paris, and there have been several other extended visits since then. At the time of the 1997 trip I had initiated, with Pierre Joris, a translation project that would extend over the next few years. What we had chosen to do was to translate the collected poetry of Picasso into English, Pierre to focus on the French and I on the Spanish. So I brought Picasso with me to Paris, or in another sense, I found him there: Picasso and other ghosts in a Paris that had long since dissolved into history and myth, leaving their names on houses and streets or, for some, etched onto tombstones in the city’s great cemeteries.

I began in fact to think of Paris as a cemetery city, a city filled with ghosts – both its ghosts and ours. The presence of the dead was then particularly strong for me, because of the number of friends who had died over the preceding year. These mingled with the ghosts of that early avant-garde whose place had been here and whose work we had been determined – some of us – to reach and to surpass. But more than that of course, there was the actual city as it existed in the summer and autumn of 1997 – an evidently threatened economy that made for an increased number of beggars, some curiously well-dressed I thought, in the streets where we were living. That was in a space between La République and the Canal, where in the square itself one afternoon we saw what seemed to be a large soup kitchen for the unemployed. And whatever I saw there fused quite naturally with Picasso’s words as we had brought them over into English:

the blockhead who stretching out his hand asks them for a little alms sitting alone on the ground in the middle of the plaza

and again:

over the beggar’s handonly adorned with blossomsalms collected through those worldshe pulls along

All this to form another continuity.

The poem that follows, translated here by Jean Portante, is not only a lament for the dead and the living, but a celebration of my own French connection as it appeared to me in 1997. The first of the three elegies is derived from Picasso’s favored form, a block of prose absent all punctuation, and the second is the account of an event, a minor existential crisis, in the Pyrenees. It is in the third, however, that the fusion takes place – of past and present, dream and waking life – and leads me to the realization of a world in which time loses its meaning in a simultaneous present which isn’t time at all. If this can travel from my own place and language into yours, then it’s likely that another connection will have taken place.

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